Democracy Dies in Darkness
Trump’s rage at a Fox News anchor contains a key
President Trump watches Fox News obsessively and constantly tweets examples of Fox News personalities extolling his glorious greatness. But every now and then, Trump explodes with rage at the network — when it departs from its mission to function as his personal 24/7 propaganda channel and lapses into momentary truth-telling.
Trump’s rage at a Fox News anchor contains a key tell
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‘This will kill you’: Fox’s Neil Cavuto at center of Trump’s hydroxychloroquine madness
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Enough with the QAnon and ‘Liberate’ tweets, Mr. Trump. Coronavirus is lethal enough.
The deluded QAnon cult chugs on as an implicit threat on Donald Trump’s behalf. And the president has rewarded its fealty with at least 131 retweets.
President Trump’s top health advisers attended a White House event with protective masks, though the president himself did not wear a face covering.
USA TODAY
I have no hope that Donald Trump will ever behave like a president of all 50 United States. But I ask one simple thing from him and his son: Please stop trying to get my fellow Americans killed.
It’s impossible to keep track of all the norms Trump is petulantly stomping on as he runs for reelection amid the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.
As the American death toll from COVID-19 has moved closer to 100,000, he has fired inspector general after inspector general, the only independent watchdogs inside the executive branch. His lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that this president should essentially be immune from all prosecution and oversight, denying taxpayers the right to know whether he’s even a taxpayer. And @realdonaldtrump has gone into overdrive with his wild tweets and rhetoric, which he has to know could make his more unhinged supporters think he’s hoping they’ll get violent.
And some seem to be getting the message!
Trump’s troubling QAnon retweets
Detroit real estate agent Robert Sinclair Tesh has been arraigned on a terrorism charge after he made what authorities determined were credible death threats against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel. We can’t say for sure whether the man behind the alleged threats was a Trump fan. But he does appear to be a fan of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, having used hashtags associated with the movement.
This arrest ties together two of the most dangerous threads of what rhetoric professor Jennifer Mercieca describes as Trump’s “argument ad baculum” in her forthcoming book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” These “appeals to the stick,” or implicit threats of force or intimidation, are “used by a demagogue to attack and overwhelm opponents,” Mercieca writes.
Trump has literally incited Michiganders to rise up against their governor with a “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” tweet that former Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord called illegal. And he has cheered on the so-called protesters who’ve garnered national attention by flooding into Michigan’s Capitol brandishing firearms, something you’d never be allowed to do at an NRA convention when Vice President Mike Pence is speaking.
But it’s the connection to the QAnon movement that’s most troubling about this arrest.
Donald Trump supporters hold up phones referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Feb. 21, 2020.
While there are always oaky traces of a death cult inside the Republican Party — “pro-lifers” fulminating for unnecessary wars and executions — the calls to sacrifice American (especially older Americans) to “the economy” have become audible as the death toll from COVID-19 has risen.
But QAnon is a literal death cult. It imagines crimes, often cannibalism and pedophilia, that would justify the arrest and even execution of the president’s opponents and enemies. And it’s also a domestic terror threat, according to liberal fake news sources such as the FBI.
What Republicans don’t get: Donald Trump is our biggest obstacle to coronavirus recovery
Either violent people are attracted to this fantasy — which originally touted Trump as an all-powerful crusader bound to take down international child sex rings and now seems more interested in spreading COVID-19 misinformation to justify Trump’s panoply of failures — or individuals who are into Q just happen to enjoy making criminal threats or killing a family member with a sword.
Of course, the big joke of all this is that Trump is the guy who started a teen beauty pageant, and several former contestants said Trump walked in on them while they were in various states of undress. And the one big name child sex offender this administration has arrested — former Trump playmate Jeffrey Epstein — died mysteriously in the custody of Trump’s Department of Justice, an unresolved crime that stinks of a real conspiracy.
Still, the deluded QAnon cult chugs on as an implicit threat on Trump’s behalf. And the president has rewarded its fealty with at least 131 retweets.
Tickling death cult bone of dad’s fans
Anyone paying any attention knows that when Donald Trump Jr. makes a joke about former Vice President Joe Biden being a pedophile, he’s trying to tickle the death cult bone of his dad’s fan base. And when Don Jr. pretends to back off by then reiterating the charge, he’s showing that he has learned his daddy’s “I’m not saying; I’m just saying” rhetorical trick of paralipsis.
Mercieca says that’s what demagogues use "to circulate rumors and accusations, to ironically say two things at once, and to build a relationship with supporters.”
I get the desperation.
The Trumps’ best attempt at digging up foreign dirt on Biden resulted in impeachment and the revelation that Biden was actually leading the international community’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.
They haven’t found any attack on Biden yet that tanks him the way they smeared a woman for using personal email. And older voters are telling pollsters that they may be abandoning Trump. (Maybe because they’ve heard that some Republicans think they should stop complaining about COVID-19 and start dying.)
Trump impeachment intimidation: Weaponized Twitter feed, die-hard fans who get the ‘code’
This is all bound to get more intense as Trump feels the risk of losing the one job in the United States that prevents him from being indicted. The question is how many people the Trumps are willing to take down with them.
The president’s steaming rhetoric may have influenced his superfan Cesar Sayoc, who was convicted of mailing bombs to 13 Trump opponents — including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The only thing that saved us from this Trump fan carrying out one of the worst terror attacks in American history was his incompetence.
But as Trump’s election proved, competence isn’t necessary for success.
So please, Mr. President, stop trying to get us killed. COVID-19 is bad enough on its own.
© Copyright Gannett 2020
2020 ELECTION
Trump’s trip to the Hill was all about campaign, not coronavirus
At a lunch with Republican senators, Trump focused on poll numbers, Joe Biden and telling senators they need to toughen up or they’ll lose in November
President Trump went to Capitol Hill Tuesday with the campaign on his mind, not coronavirus.
In a nearly hour long lunch with Republican senators, the president focused on poll numbers, Joe Biden, and telling senators they need to toughen up or they’ll lose in November, according to multiple senators leaving the lunch.
“He just said be tough, don’t get rolled over by them,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said.
“He was encouraging all of us to get in the fight and not get pushed around,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
The president’s latest campaign strategy involves pushing investigations into the Obama administration’s treatment of Michael Flynn, which Trump refers to as “Obamagate.” It’s an attempt to undermine the foundations of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and possible collusion with the Trump team.
It comes as the president is less than six months away from facing Biden in the general election — and with the Senate now in play, there is a very real possibility that Democrats could control all the elected levers of power in Washington for the first time since Republicans won back the House in 2010.
“I think the president thinks that on certain issues we act like a bunch of weenies, and I agree with him,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said.
Pressed to explain on which issues the president believed senators were “weenies,” Kennedy said: “On getting serious about finding out what happened with respect to Flynn and Carter Page. … You guys know what I’m talking about.”
Kennedy was referring to Flynn, Trump’s former national security who the Justice Department wants to drop harges of lying to the FBI of which he was convicted of, and Page, a Trump campaign adviser who the FBI conducted surveillance on in its investigation of whether the campaign was colluding with Russia.
A senior administration official put it this way: “Trump’s message to Republicans was that they will be successful if they stick together and are tough” — while a Republican Capitol Hill aide familiar with the remarks said the message “was 'We’re doing a great job on Corona and Pelosi is mean.’”
Trump’s focus on questioning Democrats’ campaign tactics comes as the country is still in the throes of the coronavirus crisis. While the president touched briefly on testing and vaccines, there was no mention of state and local aid that desperate states are waiting for, according to multiple sources.
There were brief discussions of future aid bills but it wasn’t the focus of the conversations, senators said.
© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL
President calls negative hydroxychloroquine study ‘a Trump enemy statement’ – live
Trump falsely claims hydroxychloroquine ‘doesn’t harm you’
Vice-president says he is not taking anti-malaria drug
Trump says he’s taking hydroxychloroquine despite FDA warnings
Strikes erupt as US essential workers demand protection amid pandemic
“Trump’s latest order makes about as much sense as drinking bleach,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s using the pandemic to slash life-saving protections for our air, water, and wildlife when these safeguards have never been more important. It’s astounding that Trump is so out of touch with the majority of people who understand that there can’t be economic recovery on a dying planet.”
Trump signs executive order to hasten rollback of regulations
Trump has signed an executive order encouraging agencies to cut regulations in the name of economic recovery.
“Agencies must continue to remove barriers to the greatest engine of economic prosperity the world has ever known: the innovation, initiative, and drive of the American people,” the order states.
President Trump signs Executive Order giving Cabinet members authority to cut regulations.
A new study suggests a connection between crowded polling places and the spread of Covid-19 in Wisconsin during the state’s April 7 election.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
The study finds a “statistically and economically significant association between in-person voting and the spread of COVID-19 two to three weeks after the election.” By studying state election and Covid-19 data, researchers concluded that consolidating polling places and decreasing the number of absentee ballots led to an increase in positive Covid-19 tests weeks after the election. The research by economists at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, University of
Wisconsin-Madison and Ball State University was published as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.“Our results indicate that Wisconsin counties with higher levels of in-person voting per polling location led to increases in the weekly positive rate of COVID-19 tests,” they wrote.
Furthermore, counties with higher absentee voting participation had lower rates of detecting COVID-19 two to three weeks after the election.”State and local officials scrambled in the weeks ahead of the election to prepare amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In Milwaukee, election officials were forced to close 175 of 180 polling places, but other places, such as the city of Madison, were able to keep 66 of 99 polling places open.
State health officials said that 52 people who tested positive for Covid-19 participated in in-person voting, but have cautioned they don’t know if people contracted the virus at the polls.
Here’s some more on that VA study that the president has described as “a Trump enemy statement”:
The study by VA and academic researchers reviewed the cases of 368 male patients treated at government hospitals — 97 treated with hydroxychloroquine, 113 with hydroxychloroquine, and the antibiotic azithromycin, and 158 without any hydroxychloroquine.
The study found that those who were treated with the antimalarial drug had a higher risk of death. But the research comes with several big caveats.
Most significantly, the study is retrospective. Rather than randomly assigning some patients to be treated with hydroxychloroquine and others without, researchers looked back on how patients who had and had not taken the drug fared. It’s unclear why doctors gave some patients the drug and not others, and it’s possible that physicians treated the most severe cases with hydroxychloroquine, which could at least partly explain why those patients fared worse.
The research was published as a pre-print — it has not yet gone through a rigorous process of peer review.
But there is absolutely no evidence that the researchers behind the study were biased, against the administration or against the use of the drug.
In response to growing criticism, the VA said last week that while it wouldn’t halt the use of hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment, it would offer the unproven drug to fewer patients
And now this:
A number of commentators noted that several Republican-led states, including West Virginia, Georgia and Nebraska, have also pushed to expand vote by mail, yet Trump has not threatened to withhold funding from them.
A former senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign suggested the president would be much better served by developing effective strategies for vote by mail, which is supported by most Americans.
A Gallup poll released last week showed 64% of Americans, including 40% of Republicans, support allowing all voters to vote by mail or absentee ballot.
The issue will likely become increasingly important as the November general election approaches, considering many public health experts are expecting a second wave of coronavirus cases later this year.
Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a member of the progressive group known as “the Squad,” mocked Trump for incorrectly saying her state was sending absentee ballots to all registered voters.
Tlaib applauded her state for promoting democracy “without jeopardizing people’s health” and accused Trump of “endangering people’s lives” through his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
The president is visiting a Ford Motors plant in Michigan today, and he will almost certainly be asked about his (likely unconstitutional) threat to withhold funding funding from Michigan over the state’s vote by mail policy.
A number of legal experts pointed out in reaction to Trump’s tweets about Michigan and Nevada that withholding federal funding from states over opposition to a specific policy would almost certainly be unconstitutional.
From a former federal prosecutor:
From a University of Alabama law professor:
States run their own elections. Congress voted the funds to support voting in Covid relief bills. Trump, who has already publicly conceded Republicans can’t win if too many people vote, seems to think his power is limitless & includes controlling elections. https://t.co/uoncNjBHpt
Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson corrected Trump’s tweet about her state’s vote by mail policies, noting her office only sent ballot applications (not actual ballots) to registered voters.
Hi! I also have a name, it’s Jocelyn Benson. And we sent applications, not ballots. Just like my GOP colleagues in Iowa, Georgia, Nebraska and West Virginia. https://t.co/kBsu4nHvOy
Benson said yesterday that the move would ensure that “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”
“We know from the elections that took place this month that during the pandemic Michiganders want to safely vote,” Benson said.
It will be interesting to see how Nevada’s secretary of state reacts to Trump’s threat, considering she is a Republican.